With allowances frozen or cut, you may have underpaid tax for 2023/24. Rising income – for example in the form of pensions, dividends or interest – and frozen or reduced allowances are a recipe for creating more taxpayers and higher tax bills. This is becoming increasingly clear as some people are discovering that they became […]
Gold (Au on the periodic table) is having its day in the sun, but for how long? Long before Bitcoin was even a twinkle in the eye of its alleged inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, there was gold. If you did not trust rulers, institutions or paper money, gold was what you owned to protect your finances. […]
The fees for obtaining probate in England and Wales have increased. The fee charged to obtain probate in England and Wales has been increased from £273 to £300 (10%) and for confirmation in Scotland, which has a sliding scale by 2%. Northern Ireland revised its probate fees in November 2023. Whether the higher […]
There are several ways to minimise the amount of IHT your family pay when you’re gone. In addition to maximising IHT allowances, other planning opportunities include utilising gift exemptions. Making IHT-free gifts Each financial year you can make gifts of up to £3,000 (in total, not per recipient) and if you don’t use this in […]
In the first ten months of the 2023/24 financial year, HMRC collected £6.3bn in IHT receipts, £0.4bn more than the same period the previous fiscal year. This represents a 6.8% rise year-on-year and suggests this year’s annual figure will comfortably surpass last year’s record-breaking total of £7.1bn. With the nil-rate threshold frozen at £325,000 for […]
National Savings provides a glimpse of the new bond promised in the Spring Budget. Jeremy Hunt’s Spring Budget had an emphasis on Britishness with talk of “the great British pub”, ‘the British ISA’ (now a UK ISA) and ‘Great British Nuclear’. Included on the list of Britishness was the promise of a new ‘British Savings […]
